Directed by Jean Renoir

The son of the great impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean Renoir was also a master of his medium: cinema. After making his mark in the early thirties with two very different films, the anarchic send-up of the bourgeoisie BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING and the popular-front Gorky adaptation THE LOWER DEPTHS, Renoir closed out the decade with a critical humanistic study of French society that routinely turns up near the top of lists of the greatest films ever made: THE RULES OF THE GAME. After a brief, unfulfilling Hollywood stint during World War II, Renoir traveled to India to make his first Technicolor film, THE RIVER, and then returned to Europe in the early fifties to direct three visually dazzling explorations of theater, THE GOLDEN COACH, FRENCH CANCAN, and ELENA AND HER MEN. Renoir persisted in his cinematic pursuits until the late sixties, when he decided to dedicate himself solely to writing, leaving the future of the medium to those who looked to him in reverence.